ismisses with disdain the passions which have hitherto
beset him. He will no longer serve them when his cause no longer needs
them. He speaks to men now only in the name of his genius. This title is
enough to cause obedience to him. His power is based on the assent which
truth finds in all minds, and his strength again reverts to him. He
contests with all parties, and rises superior to one and all. All hate
him because he commands; and all seek him because he can serve or
destroy them. He does not give himself up to any one, but negotiates
with each: he lays down calmly on the tumultuous element of this
assembly, the basis of the reformed constitution: legislation, finance,
diplomacy, war, religion, political economy, balances of power, every
question he approaches and solves, not as an Utopian, but as a
politician. The solution he gives is always the precise mean between the
theoretical and the practical. He places reason on a level with manners,
and the institutions of the land in consonance with its habits. He
desires a throne to support the democracy, liberty in the chambers, and
in the will of the nation, one and irresistible in the government. The
characteristic of his genius, so well defined, so ill understood, was
less audacity than justness. Beneath the grandeur of his expression is
always to be found unfailing good sense. His very vices could not
repress the clearness, the sincerity of his understanding. At the foot
of the tribune he was a man devoid of shame or virtue: in the tribune he
was an honest man. Abandoned to private debauchery, bought over by
foreign powers, sold to the court in order to satisfy his lavish
expenditure, he preserved, amidst all this infamous traffic of his
powers, the incorruptibility of his genius. Of all the qualities of a
great man of his age, he was only wanting in honesty. The people were
not his devotees, but his instruments,--his own glory was the god of his
idolatry; his faith was posterity; his conscience existed but in his
thought; the fanaticism of his idea was quite human; the chilling
materialism of his age had crushed in his heart the expansion, force,
and craving for imperishable things. His dying words were "sprinkle me
with perfumes, crown me with flowers, that I may thus enter upon eternal
sleep." He was especially of his time, and his course bears no impress
of infinity. Neither his character, his acts, nor his thoughts have the
brand of immortality. If he had believ